A Song for Julia

nothing had happened. I’m not the blushing beauty type, but I could feel a little bit of heat on the back of my neck, probably from their eyes boring through me like laser beams.
    This was getting way too cozy, so as I finished drying the last dish, I interrupted Dad’s story to ask Julia, “So how do you want to work this thing about the car?”
    Dad gave me a seriously annoyed look, as if to say, ‘Where the hell did you learn your manners.’
    She shrugged. “Um … go get an estimate and let me know how much it is? I can give you a ride back over there when I go.”
    I nodded. “All right.”
    “How bad’s the damage?” my dad asked.
    “Not bad,” I said, “just dented,” right at the same time she said, “I think it’s probably totaled. Frame’s bent.”
    Now she was a car expert, too? What I knew about cars you could fit in the change pocket in my wallet.
    “That’s bad,” my dad said.
    “We’ll find out,” I said.
    “How much did you pay for the car?” Dad asked.
    “A thousand.”
    One thousand dollars. Which, after studio and recording fees, and the rent, and eating, and public transportation, had taken six months of cooking for me to save. Morbid Obesity wasn’t exactly making the charts, and right now we were very much in the red.
    She grimaced. “It’ll cost a lot more than that to fix it, if I’m right. Might be best to just buy you a new one.”
    “Yeah, well, I don’t exactly have the money to buy a new car.”
    “I told you I’d take care of it. It’s my fault.”
    “Maybe we should get going, then,” I said.
    She nodded, her face suddenly looking sad again. I didn’t get it. Most of the time when I was here, I wanted nothing more than to run away. But here she was, suddenly making herself at home. Was her ‘I don’t get involved’ all some kind of game, and she was one of those clingy girls who would be calling and texting me in the middle of the damn night?
    “You promised,” Sean said, not even looking up from his book.
    “So I did,” she responded to him. “Let’s go check out that piano.”
    She stood, and my eyes followed every inch of her as she did so, from the curve of her butt, her breasts, to the slight hollow in the base of her neck. I’d had my share of beautiful girls. But Julia was something different.
    So, somehow the three of us, my dad, brother and I, ended up following her into our living room as if we were the guests.
    She approached the piano with extreme caution, her body turned just slightly away from it. “This is a beautiful piano,” she said.
    My dad said, “It’s my wife’s … it belonged to her grandmother.”
    “Does she play often?”
    “Not anymore,” dad replied, sadness in his voice. God, that killed me. The way he acted—like it was his fault she’d left. I’d never understand that. But both of my parents were a mystery to me. How they fell in love, how they split up, and especially how they manage to stand each other now, given what happened.
    She sat down and lifted the fallboard gently, then touched the keys, somehow reverently and expertly at the same time. She positioned her hands expertly. “I’m badly out of practice. I don’t get many opportunities to play these days.”
    Then she started playing, gently, and I recognized the piece instantly. It was the sad, almost menacing beginning of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20. Not an easy piece to play, under any circumstances, much less if you were badly out of practice. She was being almost falsely modest, because her execution was perfect. Better than perfect, it was haunting. And not the least of which was because my mother had once played it in this very room. I looked over at Sean, half expecting to see him blow up.
    He was sitting on the couch, nose stuck in his textbook. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t listening. In fact, this was normal behavior for him when faced with something overwhelming. He just scanned the words, down one column, then the next, then the next, and then he flipped the page.
    My dad, though … he stood in the doorway, leaning against it, and his eyes were watering. He saw me look at him, and an almost angry expression came over his face. He blinked his eyes, then roughly wiped them and looked away from me.
    Of course, I knew why he gave me that look.
    I felt like I was holding my breath as she played. That piano hadn’t been played in six years, and it would have been six more if Sean hadn’t insisted on it. The music was